Un Paso Más:

Cuban Dispatches, 1998

by Adam Jones

All photographs by the author.

[N.B.: If you want to print the file and the photographs with it,
give them a few moments to download fully.]

The following is an account of an independent journey through Cuba
in August 1998. The dispatches were written as group e-mails for friends,
family, and students; some edits and additions were made subsequently,
but I have not altered the basic tone or epistolary format. Certain names
and identifying details have been changed to protect those who shared their
lives and views so openly with me. Acknowledgment should be made of two
books, Susan Eckstein's Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro
and David Stanley's Cuba Travel Survival Kit, published by Lonely Planet (hereafter, LP). Both proved indispensable sources of statistics
and background information. Unless otherwise indicated, all dollar figures
given are in U.S. currency.

Havana - Tuesday, 5 August 1998

I think so, anyway. It's all been a bit of a blur.

It began with a glitch-ridden day of travel, after an uncomfortable
night and early morning passed in the Guadalajara airport ... where I arrived only after a half-hour lugging of my bags to the old bus station
downtown. The driver took things at a brisk pace throughout, screamed into
the airport, around the ring road in front of the terminal, out the other
side, back down the highway ... "Hey!" I charged up to the front, but the
driver was so in the zone that it took him another half-kilometre or so
to actually pull over, explaining that he only stopped if someone wanted
to board or get off. I hauled my bags out and back up the road to the terminal
building under the watchful, slightly mocking gazes of the Mexican passengers.

Guadalajara Airport itself rated about three out of ten on my scale
of international airports, as a place to crash. (The more restful kind
of "crash," I hasten to add.) It had chairs, and the authorities didn't
turf me out at some ungodly hour of the night, or otherwise harass me.
I docked it a notch, though, for the mosquitoes, who feasted on the tender
flesh of my hands whenever I could manage to put myself to sleep - sprawled
over two chairs and my luggage.

At around 4 a.m. I moved through to the departure lounge. This feint didn't
shake the mosquitoes, who circled overhead like buzzards. The flight, I was told,
was delayed 25 minutes. "But please don't worry. That will still give you
half an hour to make your connection in Mexico City." I began to feel vague
presentiments of doom, but managed to suppress them all the way to La
Capital. We landed at Mexico City Airport at 6:30 a.m., with plenty
of time to catch my Havana flight. We coasted comfortably towards the terminal
building. And then we stopped. For five minutes. Getting edgy. The announcement:
"We're waiting for our bay to be prepared. We anticipate another eight
or ten minutes." Add five for Latin time, and I was in big trouble.

I stressed this out until finally, at around seven, we docked at the
terminal building. I charged down the hallway in the classic T.V.-commercial
fashion ... only to discover the flight had left right on schedule. They'd
known there were four of us on the Guadalajara flight with Havana connections;
but they'd felt it was better to send the other travelers on their way
on time. I leave you to judge the decision. Many hours later, it came to
possess a certain utilitarian logic - especially when you considered that
our bags would have had to be unloaded and reloaded. But I wasn't in the
mood to do much more than huff and protest.

The solution found was a Mexicana flight to Cancún leaving two
hours later, with a quick connection on to Havana, arriving about three
hours later than originally planned. As compensation, I stole another hour's
sleep in the waiting lounge. And as it transpired, I finally got a glimpse
of the Yucatán peninsula, which surprised me with its densely-forested
terrain even after reading descriptions of the landscape in The Caste
War of Yucatan, about the Mayan uprisings there in the mid-nineteenth-century.(1)

After an hour or so in the Las Vegas-y Cancún airport, surrounded
by North American beach bums in various stages of undress and inebriation,
I caught the Aerocaribe flight to Havana. Astonishingly, this took only
45 minutes - we were barely out over open sea before we were flying over
the west coast of Cuba. Somehow the geographical proximity hadn't registered
when I scanned the maps.

From here on the logistics began to go much more smoothly. I made it
through Cuban customs with only a few friendly questions. The Cubatur bus
outside had expected me on the earlier flight, which caused some brief
discussion; but then we were buzzing off down the highway to Havana. I
tried to drink in the roadside scenery with my eyes. Our route took us
through the heart of Miramar, the ritzy outlying district that's home to
most of the foreign embassies and diplomatic residences in Havana, many
of them housed in spectacular 19th and early 20th-century
mansions. It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon. The Caribbean was visible
as a bold stripe on the horizon, and I saw the first few Cuban flags fluttering
red, white and blue in the breeze.(2)

By the time the Cubatur van pulled up at the Hotel Capri, I was the
only person left aboard. A few other passengers had disembarked at the
anonymous-looking hotel strip much further from the centre of the action.
I'd taken some care, though, to book a hotel on the eastern edge of Vedado,
bordering Central Havana, with the famous Old City (Habana Vieja) ten minutes'
or so brisk walk away.

After a blessed shower, shave, and change of apparel, I transported
myself by elevator to the 17th floor of the Hotel Capri. The
Capri before the 1959 revolution was the preferred hangout of mafiosi
bosses like "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky.(3)
Its lookout point, adjacent to the rooftop pool, offered a spectacular
view: the whole sweep of Havana and its seashore, west towards the Playa
and Mariano districts, east towards the Old City and the massive fortresses
at the entrance to the harbour.

I was running on about three hours' sleep, but after the delays of the
day I was anxious to hit the streets. I headed out into the blast-furnace
heat of late afternoon. The basic geography of Havana I had in mind from
the couple of days I spent here in 1993 (based at the beach resorts of
Playas del Este, a few kilometres east of the city). But my recollection
was comfortably hazy. I wandered almost arbitrarily along La Rampa (23rd
street) and into the heart of Vedado. I was beginning my explorations as
the working day ended and the social hours began. There were people queuing
to fill plastic bottles from a large tanker - I thought at first potable
water, but learned later that a kind of refresco, or soft drink,
was being sold for one Cuban peso per 1.5-litre bottle. That's about five
cents in U.S.-dollar terms - but not an insignificant amount for the majority
of the population that has only pesos, as I'll discuss shortly.

Couples and singles were strolling in the parks and lounging on street-corners.
I spotted a number of well-endowed women with halter tops rendered distractingly
translucent by sweat. There was a lot of recorded music blasting, interspersed
with snatches of live performance from the occasional rehearsal-session
or small-scale concert. Kids played soccer and baseball with whatever implements
were at hand. The vitality of the street-life, even without the normal
commercial-and-neon dimension that figured elsewhere in the Third World,
was overwhelming. It was also enormously energizing.

There was food to be considered. I'd expected this to be a serious hassle
in Cuba. I'd ordered the breakfast plan at the Hotel Capri, nothing more.
That sent me to the street food being sold for moneda nacional -
the national currency, the peso. Okay, take a deep breath.

There are three kinds of currency circulating in Cuba these days. The
moneda nacional is the one people are officially paid with. The
U.S. dollar, possession and circulation of which was finally legalized
in September 1993, is the most highly-prized currency. Its partner is the
convertible peso, tied to the U.S. dollar and interchangeable with it.

The dollar and peso economies are two different worlds. Granted, the
moneda nacional has recovered against the U.S. dollar since the
terrible days of the early 1990s, when the exchange rate reached 120 to
1, so that ordinary Cubans were making about $2 a month in hard-currency
terms. Today the rate is about 20 to the dollar (around where Canadian
currency stands these days, from what I've been hearing!). The change has
underpinned a degree of economic recovery, though it is still tentative
and of recent vintage.

To the extent that the traveler is able to operate in the peso economy,
which is not very far, Cuba is a cheap country. At a certain point, though,
the state demands payment in U.S. dollars. The commercial landscape at
street-level is thus an intricate network of signs and codes telling the
consumer what is available and which currency will access it. When I finally
took a break from my street-roaming and paused for sustenance, it was at
a little street-stall selling ham sandwiches and a kind of pale, fruity-tasting
refresco. Problem was, I had a fair number of U.S. dollars, but none of
the moneda nacional - and this was a peso stall. It wasn't a predicament
many Cubans would have sympathized with, but it was a hitch nonetheless.
Fortunately, a young guy who'd stopped by for a bite was happy enough to
change a couple of dollars with me - two, literally. Now I had forty Cuban
pesos to my name. That was enough for a hefty and sufficiently-edible sandwich,
which cost me a dollar - a good deal for me, but a fair chunk of a monthly
income for anyone paid in pesos.

Much revived, I wandered into the heart of Central Havana. There I found
myself outside a corner bar - just a stand-up counter, with a guy behind
it selling rum by the glass. I mean the glass - four or five ounces
each. I'd understood that many bars were built at the intersection point
of the dollar and peso economies: Cubans paid in pesos, and foreigners
the dollar equivalent at a one-to-one exchange rate. Thus, when
I asked the barman how much a glass cost, I was expecting an answer in
U.S. currency. "Five," he said. "Dollars??" It seemed a little steep, although
they were big glasses ... "Pesos," he responded promptly. That suddenly
made things a whole lot more practicable.

And so it was that I came to prop up a corner of the bar, and found
myself in conversation with Andrés. He was a serving military officer,
52 years of age, who looked a lot like Harry Belafonte. He said he'd heard
it before.

Andrés had two companions who were fairly well stuck into the
rum already, and a lot harder to understand when they spoke. He himself
held his liquor well, articulating his thoughts about as carefully and
clearly as this second-language Spanish-speaker, running on insufficient
sleep, could have hoped for. He had nice things to say about Canada, which
has a reputation in Cuba as one of two countries (the other is Mexico)
that refused to join the U.S. campaign of isolation and embargo against
the island, choosing instead to maintain normal and even warm relations
with Cuba.

Andrés told me too about his life in the military. It earned
him, he said, 218 pesos a month - around $10. But he liked the country
and the revolution; the problems were not the government's fault. He invited
me to visit his house - I will try to stop by there tonight (two days later),
if I can get my move from the Hotel Capri into private housing sorted out
in time.

With a couple of rums in my belly I wandered the streets until the Cubans
went to bed, which was at a civilized hour - 10:30 or 11:00. Heading back
to the hotel, I found myself taking a short-cut through a small park not
far from the imposing gates of the University of Havana. There, I bumped
into three young people splayed across a bench. They were Oscar, Francesca
and - Eva. That led to an inevitable onslaught of Adam-and-Eve jokes, but
when the merriment had run its course, we settled into conversation. Francesca,
a very young Naomi Campbell lookalike, was pursuing a modeling career;
she already cultivated the supermodel's frail demeanour. Eva, intelligent,
was studying film; Oscar, a young Black guy, clearly lived to party, and
seemed to have every intention of doing so tonight. I didn't have the energy.
But we agreed to meet the following day at the monument commemorating the
U.S.S. Maine - on the Malecón, the seaside promenade that
winds along the periphery of the Old City, Central Havana, and Vedado.(4)

Finally it was back to the splendour of the Hotel Capri. Well, let's
not get carried away. The carpeting had seen better days. The taps squeaked
when you turned them, and the furnishings were worn. But I had air-con
and a killer 12th-floor view over the city. The TV received
CNN and a special closed-circuit channel run by the Cuban government for
foreigners only. Transported to my little hermetic tourist's world, I lay
back on clean sheets, listened to the air-conditioner hum (too audibly),
and lost consciousness for a while.

Havana - Thursday, 7 August 1998

Things are moving so quickly - experiences and sensations piling onto one
another - that it's hard to keep these dispatches up to date. But that's
not how it began on Tuesday morning.

I figure if you're going to sit in the lap of luxury for three or four
days, you might as well take time to appreciate it; also, the trek the
previous evening had given me a couple of whacking great blood blisters
that I wanted to be kind to. And so I tumbled out of bed and down to fill
up on the hotel's buffet breakfast, which, it must be said, was pretty
bad - sometimes instructively so.

The fruit trays were laden with two different kinds of grapefruit, along
with mango and watermelon. Relatively few people tucked into the grapefruit
(don't look at me - I was right in there). They stocked up instead on watermelon
and mango. But that didn't affect the pace at which the different items
were restocked. This stayed uniform, with the result that the mango-and-watermelon
crowd seemed eternally to be out of luck. Apart from the aforementioned
fruit, the buffet choice was: roasted carrots (huh?), diced potatoes -
but just diced, not fried or hash-browned or anything intricate like that;
boiled eggs; croissants like hockey pucks; and omelettes churned out to
order by an overworked chef, for which the available ingredients were:
ham and cheese. Sometimes there wasn't any cheese. It was also interesting
to note that you could sit yourself down at a table littered with the refuse
of former diners, and quite placidly eat your entire meal without anybody
bothering to clear away the detritus.

Digging into this odd and mostly unappetizing cuisine was about as exploratory
as I got for a while. I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon napping,
watching CNN, and enjoying the 12th-floor view. Around 3 p.m.
I got my act together sufficiently to shower and head out into the streets,
pulsing with afternoon heat. I wandered down through the Old City, which
I will never get enough of. "The largest Spanish colonial complex in the
Americas," LP calls it. The closest thing I've seen to it is the
Old City of Cartagena in Colombia, which is more shiningly restored, but
barely a neighbourhood compared with Havana's run-down but much more extensive
offerings.

Then it was back to the Maine monument to meet Oscar, my friend
from the previous night. We headed immediately to the Old City. Oscar said
he wanted to show me "the nicest paintings in Cuba."

Along the Callejón Hamel
They were part of what I was told is the second-largest piece of street
art in the world: an entire alley, including buildings, in the Callejón
Hamel, a nondescript lane in Central Havana covered with a long multimedia
creation by an artist named Salvador - who just happens to have his studio
in the Callejón. Salvador's work explores the influence of African
culture on Cuban society and especially the syncretic religion of Santería,
which derives from the roots many Cubans have in the Yoriba and Ibo nations
of West Africa. It would be pointless to describe the art in much greater
detail, but it was spectacular. I was glad to shake Salvador's hand and
promise to return to take photos.

The Artist Presently Known As SalvadorOscar
led me over to the market, where I bought us a couple of huge, unbelievable
mangoes - 12 pesos for both, a little over fifty cents. Oscar showed me
how to peel the mango with my teeth and then snuffle down in the fleshy
fruit, emerging with the entire lower half of my face (and unfortunately
a fair area of my T-shirt) smeared with juice.

We'd been leaving a trail of mango skin along the streets, and when
I'd had about enough, I looked for a place to toss the remainder. Oscar
was apparently looking for a place, too; at least, he cradled what was
left of his mango ruminatively in his hand. And he kept it there. Good
thing I didn't toss the rest of that fruit. This was by no means an everyday
treat in today's Cuba, and Oscar was taking the remainder home, to share
with his family and girlfriend.

At Oscar's place in Central Havana, in the tiny loft he'd adorned with
spacey graphics and lots of Rastafarian iconography, I met his companion,
Yasmin, and her friend Joanka (pronounced Ho-AHN-ka). Examples,
here, of the exotic names that abound in Cuba. The country's "proletarian
internationalism" - its military involvements in Angola and Ethiopia, the
work-and-study exchanges with the former Soviet bloc, and the sending
of tens of thousands of teachers and health-care workers overseas - have
led to quite a stew of nomenclature. My first night in town I'd been introduced
to a Luanda, which is both the capital of Angola and a very nice name for
a woman. Yasmin's name was bestowed on her by parents who had studied in Czechoslovakia, where they met
a lot of Arab students. Joanka, like the Katyusca I met in passing
yesterday and the Alexander whom you'll meet shortly, seemed a throwback
to the days of warm Russian-Cuban relations.

Stripped to the waist in the suffocating heat, I sat in that loft for
the next five hours or so. This was about the toughest test my Spanish
had ever faced, especially since Joanka, a fine-featured young black woman
from the east of Cuba, spoke the near-patois of the region around
Santiago de Cuba, giving me fits of incomprehension throughout. Yasmin,
bless her heart, understood my predicament well, and constantly urged Joanka
to slow down and speak more clearly. This did no good whatsoever, although
over time I began to adjust to Joanka's rhythm a little better.

Yasmin, for her part, spoke with wonderful clarity and impressive intellectual
force. Without any urging, she launched into a protracted critique of the
Cuban system - her voice rising loud enough, in the closely congested streets
of Central Havana, to be audible outside or in neighbouring houses. Joanka
echoed her criticisms at almost every turn, and added a few of her own.
Both the women were musicians - percussionists - and they joined in decrying
the stifling political and cultural atmosphere they were forced to put
up with. Cuba, said Yasmin, is encountering a basic contradiction: capitalistic
elements have been grafted onto a state-socialist system, but with no clear
indication from the government exactly which of the two directions the
country is headed in. The profusion of currencies, and payment in pesos
when people were charged for many items in dollars, well symbolized the
quandary. Castro, Yasmin said - calling him El Señor, a standard
code-word - seemed to have run out of ideas. She described the absurdity
of turning every state radio and TV channel over to five-hour speeches
from Castro, so that his words became well-nigh inescapable. Then she jokingly
pointed out the copy of Marx's Das Kapital that she'd been made
to read at university. About 150 pages were missing from the back - ripped
away, she said, to use as toilet paper.

When my laughter ebbed, Yasmin suddenly - again with no urging - launched
into a paean to Fidel. He was the guardian of Cuba's independence, she
said: a world-class leader who had given Cuba disproportionate visibility
internationally; an enormously popular symbol among the poor of Latin America
and the Caribbean. Castro, as we spoke, was winding up a three-country
tour of Caribbean states, concluding with Grenada - which the U.S. invaded
in 1983, allegedly to stave off Cuban intervention. The Cubans living there
(including the dozens killed during the invasion) were construction workers,
building an international runway supervised by a British consortium. The
fact that Grenadians held no grudge towards Cuba was evident from the popular
welcome Castro had received, comparable in its warmth to the fiesta-like
treatment he'd gotten earlier in Jamaica.

Both Yasmin and Joanka, then, found things to like in Castro's leadership
and the political system more generally. They spoke favourably of a number
of senior ministers (all of whom have a lot more visibility and durability
than their Canadian counterparts). Ricardo Alarcón, Castro's most
likely successor, came in for a good deal of praise: a capable, moderate,
innovative person, said Yasmin.(5) But the
frustration and sometimes humiliation of living outside the dollar economy,
while Cubans with relatives who'd abandoned the revolution for the U.S.
lived like kings, was their biggest source of hardship. "It just pushes
you to prostitute yourself," said Yasmin. Indeed: if you don't work directly
in the tourist economy, what other way is there to get dollars? This is
one reason the institution of the casa particular (private home)
is so important - it gives Cubans the right to rent out rooms in their
dwellings to travelers who can't pay luxury-hotel rates. The state's ambivalent
attitude towards the institution, and the heavy tax load imposed on renters,
is a source of irritation for many ordinary citizens.

The conversation stretched until 10:30 at night. By then I could hardly
get any more Spanish syllables out of my mouth, and we broke off. Joanka
walked me most of the way home: her house lay not far from the Capri. We
both felt a little uncomfortable with the knowing glances we received in
the street. A foreign visitor strolling with a young, elegantly-proportioned
black woman meant only one thing to most Havana residents. Prostitution
was, if anything, more pervasive and above-ground than the last time I
was here, in 1993. At a guess, anywhere up to 50 percent of the tourists
in Cuba were there for the cheap sex.

Saturday, 7 August 1998

Where am I up to now - Tuesday? The pace remains dizzying. Only in the
last 24 hours or so have I begun to feel settled - or resettled. That's
right: this is the first dispatch to come to you live from a casa particular.

For independent travelers on a limited budget, the casa particular
is about the only option in Cuba. The standards and facilities vary widely,
from what I've been told. Mine is near the basic end of the spectrum. It
is located in Central Havana, close to the heart of the Old City. Almost
automatically, this means it is in a run-down building. This one, though,
feels fairly safe structurally - as long as you don't live on the second
floor (a different residence), where the rotted railing looks as though
it wouldn't support the weight of a toddler.

I, fortunately, am on the ground floor - in the care of a delightful
woman named Felicia. As I talked to Felicia, and with the dizzying profusion
of relatives, friends, and customers who stopped by, I learned more about
her set-up.

Felicia responded to the economic crisis of the early '90s by opening
a paladar - a private restaurant - in her living room. Twice she
operated it; twice she was closed down by the authorities, who are jealous
of the official monopoly they enjoy in the culinary field as well as hotel
accommodation. And running a restaurant is a bitch in Cuba. You have to
have solid sources of supply beyond the state channels, which are undependable;
you have to work very hard; and there's the risk of a crackdown by the
authorities. Running a casa particular doesn't remove this risk,
but the work is easier - all you have to do, usually, is turf one of your
family members out of their bed whenever a foreigner needs a room, plant
them elsewhere in the house or with friends, and rake in a massive amount
of money by Cuban standards. I'm paying US $12 a night to Felicia, which
is better than I expected to do here, but still a month-and-a-half's income
for the average Cuban. The price would likely have been higher if Felicia
had chosen to register her place with the authorities and pay tax on her
income. To do so, though, would risk ruin. The government took a particularly
dim view of casas particulares in tourist areas, where the state
hotels were concentrated. So you could easily end up paying hundreds of
dollars in monthly taxes in Central Havana, whether you rented out the
room or not. I didn't feel a lot of guilt about helping Felicia evade
the taxes. The government had charged me $25 just to enter Cuba, and would
hit me up for another $20 when I left. It was also determined to charge
me in dollars for train-fares that Cubans could pay in pesos - at a one-to-one
exchange rate. I figured I would be pouring enough greenbacks into the
state's coffers during the trip to take refuge in the underground economy
now and then.

For my daily $12 ($4 of which, I discover later, goes to Oscar as a
commission for leading me to the room), I got a comfortable bed with clean
sheets, a good fan, a separate bathroom, and a sitting-and-kitchen area
which I don't use. My chambers had two separate entrances, both locked.
Well, I suppose they should have been locked, according to the most
elementary traveler's precautions. But frankly, after the first few hours,
I didn't bother. If you knew Cuba, and the house Felicia kept, this might
make more sense. Crime and theft are far from unknown in Havana: I have
been repeatedly cautioned (and have repeatedly ignored cautions) to wear
my shoulder-bag with the strap across my chest, to guard against bicycle-riding
thieves who stage snatch-and-grabs in the street. (Necessity in the face
of austerity, perhaps. Elsewhere in Latin America, the thieves would be
on motorbikes.) Bag-snatchers aside, there is no doubt Cuba is an extraordinarily
safe society in terms of physical security. And the home seems almost sacrosanct:
I've not heard a report of a Cuban who'd experienced a break-and-enter,
though it can happen. This is one reason, I've decided, why the street-life
in Havana remains so vibrant. The membrane separating domestic from public
realms is porous. As for the interior space, I decided to take Felicia
at her word that I had nothing to fear from her family, friends, or visitors.
She seemed to have things well in hand.

Another thing she often had in hand was a customer's hair. That was
the official function of her establishment - a beauty-salon. Stepping out
into the common area usually meant encountering a neighbourhood local seated
in a wooden chair, getting a cut or a perm. (They head over to the common
sink to rinse off; there was one fifties-style hair-dryer away in the corner).
While Felicia was busy clipping and styling, the black-and-white TV blared
the afternoon telenovela (soap opera) to a handful of glazed or
galvanized viewers.

The late afternoon and early evenings at Felicia's were spent around
a common table, together with Marcos, a Spanish guy who'd been staying
on-and-off with Felicia for four years now. Yes - four years. To
hear him tell it (in a fine Castilian accent), he'd worked various jobs
in Spain, from fishing to mountain-rescue, then finally opened a supermarket
and become independently wealthy - wealthy enough, he said, to retire and
live off the proceeds, at the young age of 35. He headed down to the foreign
division of one of the big state banks every week or two, swiped his credit-card
through, collected his money, and headed back to pass another day (or rather
another night) in Havana. Since the authorities required him to leave the
country every two months to renew his visa, he had to rouse himself on
occasion. Otherwise, his ardent and explicitly-stated determination in
life was to do as little as possible. He had been back here for about five
weeks, and still hadn't gotten around to calling his mother, as he'd been
meaning to do from the first days he arrived. "There's just no time, my
friend."

With his years of experience in Havana, Marcos was an excellent source
of information, and a good guy to knock back a few beers with. His rhythm,
though, was built around all-night sessions in the local clubs and restaurants
- and, above all, on the Malecón. There, around four or four-thirty
in the afternoon, he more or less began his day, exchanging glances and
words with strolling Cuban women. "I am crazy for the women here,"
he said. It tended to keep him out until about eight o'clock in the morning
- the Malecón hummed until five or six - and he warned me that he
would not let me leave until I'd seen the sun coming up behind the Castillo
del Morro, the famous fortress at the mouth of Havana harbour. I told him
I would probably get up early rather than stay up late - among other things,
I have a lifelong aversion to discothèques. But it sounded like
a fine idea.

On Wednesday afternoon, Oscar took me to a beautifully-restored mansion
that houses the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC). A half-dozen
or so up-and-coming Cuban groups were putting on a concert. For Oscar and
his companions, the admission was ten Cuban pesos (fifty cents US at the
current rates); for me, five dollars. I had to concede there was a certain
democratic dimension to this. It meant the audience consisted of dollar-bearing
foreigners and peso-paying Cubans, rather than degenerating into a tourist
ghetto. And any reservations I might have had about the entry fee were
blown out the window when the music started. It was a marvelous venue,
the crowd sitting at tables in the courtyard of this 19th-century mansion,
with the stage set up on the steps. And it was a marvelously diverse selection
of music. Things started with a couple of visiting U.S. singers - part
of a cultural exchange - who sang very creditably in Spanish. Things didn't
really begin to cook, though, until the first Cuban group took the stage;
and the concert hit the stratosphere with the charming Brazilian guitarist
who followed them. It was the first time I'd heard bossa nova sung
with such shading and detail. If I told you he closed his set with "The
Girl from Ipanema," the most famous Brazilian pop song, you might laugh
- but only if you'd never heard it sung as sweetly and wistfully as on
this night.

Brazilian guitarist, Havana
The last lineup of the evening featured a group that had already entertained
us with some stinging acoustic blues, joined by everyone who felt like
getting up on stage. The show-closer was a powerhouse version of Cuba's
most famous song, "Guantanamera." Again, this had the potential for kitsch;
but it was sung as a slow blues, which allowed all the majesty of the lyrics
to emerge:

I'm a sincere man
from the land of the palm tree,
and before I die I wish to sing
these heart-felt verses.
With the poor of the land I want
to share a fate,
and the mountain stream pleases me
more than the sea.

The lyrics are taken from a poem, "Versos Sencillos," written in 1891 by
Cuba's greatest nationalist figure, Jose Martí, killed in battle
against Spanish colonial forces four years later. (Cuba was a Spanish colony
for much longer than most other Latin American countries - until 1898.)
Martí's words, carefully sung, imbued the well-known chorus that
followed with a special note of celebration and liberation. As sung by
a dozen or so full-throated individuals on stage and most of the audience
as well, it was an unforgettable moment.

The unifying fount of this diverse music, it seemed to me, was West
Africa. Bossa nova, blues, son (Cuban country music), salsa
- they were all traceable to the slave ships that dragged Africa to America
hundreds of years ago (until 1865 in Cuba). Cuba keeps its African connection
alive mainly through its music, as well as through the beliefs pervading
santería religion. The Spanish influence lay in melding guitar
and melody with the percussive heart of West African sounds. Now the Cuban
synthesis itself commands a worldwide influence - not least in West Africa.

All-woman percussion band
Thursday night, too, found me briefly at a pop concert. I didn't spend
long enough to get the full flavour - I was desperately tired - but again
I witnessed the sheer joy that burst forth when nearly anyone played, sang,
or just listened to music in this country. Song is literally a life-force
in Cuba, in a way that no western culture can duplicate. Even the moments
when music stepped forward to lead western culture - say, in the
1960s - tended to have a generational character, and to highlight divisions
and rifts at the same time as they broke down certain social barriers.
In Cuba, by contrast, the tradition is universal and cross-generational.
Beyond keeping just about every musician in the country on its payroll,
the state seems to have little interest in restricting the diversity of
Cuban sounds. Rock and roll, and other "decadent" western imports,
are more tightly controlled. But much as I might criticize such cultural
constraints in Cuba, I had to admit you could go a long way musically without
ever leaving the island. Even the politicized music recorded in the 1970s
and '80s - by Silvio Rodríguez and many others - stood out, partly
because the state held musicians on a rather looser rein than many other
artists and intellectuals.

The greyness afflicting other parts of Cuban culture, though, was hard
to avoid. The mass media, in particular, were already seeming terribly
dreary. Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist Party
(and the only national daily newspaper), was now running eight pages a
day instead of the four it was limited to at the height of the período
especial ("Special Period") in 1992-93. Granma would probably
tell you if the outside world suddenly exploded. Otherwise, though, there
wasn't much international news, except to the extent that Fidel was hitting
the road.

As for television, I'd been hearing it more than watching it, given
my bedroom's proximity to Felicia's noisy set. I didn't actually plant
myself in front of it until last night, when I managed to drop by the house
of Andrés and his partner, Carmen. Do you remember Andrés,
the military officer from that neighbourhood bar on my first night in Havana?
He lived, I learned, at street-level on Avenida Sol in the Old City, close
to the imposing Capitolio building. When I arrived, the TV was blaring
a Colombian soap opera, Las Aguas Mansas, dubbed into Spanish. Such
programming is massively popular in Cuba (as all over Latin America), and
Andrés seemed as rapt a viewer as any. I asked him whether he was
a fan, and this dedicated military man smiled a broad smile and responded,
"Well, there's not a hell of a lot else to watch." Surely, I asked, sometimes
they showed movies? Andrés brightened quickly. True, he said. In
fact, one of the two TV channels in the country would shortly be broadcasting
the first of a series of old Tarzan flicks.

It was a great pleasure to meet Carmen: a large, extremely buoyant woman
topped with an impressive tower of silver-grey hair. As it transpired,
I was the first foreigner she and Andrés had ever welcomed in their
home. She commemorated the event by offering me a couple of glasses of
chilled, delicious mango shake, which I drank gratefully in the still-brutal
evening heat. Two fans were going: one a tiny, dusty antique, lacking even
a screen; the other a modern, free-standing model of the kind I had in
Felicia's room. Such items were available in Cuba, Carmen told me, but
only in dollars. Eighteen of them for the fan - and Carmen's patient, protracted
explanation of how she'd collected those eighteen dollars over many months
offered another object lesson in the economic difficulties that ordinary
Cubans face. Fortunately, Carmen was able to count on a few generous friends
at her place of work who pooled some money as a present. A Cuban friend
visiting from the States kicked in the rest, and Carmen got her fan.

Carmen and AndrésLike
the other Cubans I'd consulted on the subject, Carmen claimed things had
improved measurably in the last few years. Prices were ridiculously high
for, say, Cuban-made shampoo - ten pesos for a small bottle, about a twentieth
of her monthly income (she taught young children with special needs). But
at least there were bottles of shampoo to buy - and soap, to supplement
the absurd little bar that Cubans received as their monthly individual
allotment. (It lasted her, said Carmen, about three days.)

Still, it was a far cry from the halcyon days of the 1980s. Back then,
Cuba still received its six or seven billion dollars a year in subsidies
from the Soviet Union. "You could buy an entire fat chicken for ten pesos,"
Carmen remembered. "Now it costs you perhaps five or six U.S. dollars -
a hundred pesos." She found herself spending nearly the same amount - half
her salary - on cooking oil to supplement the meagre state ration. "And
today they didn't have any in the shops." Many basic foods and commodities
that she would not have thought twice about purchasing ten years ago now
had to be laboriously saved up for, or were available irregularly and/or
only with dollars, or had simply disappeared from her diet and lifestyle.
"We used to be able to go to a restaurant every now and then!"

Carmen remembered fondly the trips she'd taken to the Soviet Union as
part of a Cuban delegation. She'd even been to Moscow in winter, she said.
Their hosts had outfitted them with "boots up above your knees" to wade
through the snow; but the blanket greyness of the sky, the absence of the
twinkling Caribbean vistas, made her feel depressed. (As an aside, the
fact that many of the flights between Cuba and Eastern Europe refuelled
in Gander, Newfoundland means that a surprising number of Cubans have actually
set foot in Canada - even if only in Gander's transit lounge. Carmen described
the shiny decor and duty-free shops with evident nostalgia.)

Where visits abroad and vacations at home were once the norm, Carmen
now found her world had shrunk to her house and her place of work; she
ran nonstop from morning until midnight to meet her varied responsibilities.
From none-too-subtle signals, I sensed that Andrés, though a sweet
guy - they had been together for 31 years - was not exactly keeping up
his end of the domestic chores. Perhaps his visits to the neighbourhood
rum-stand, though fortuitous for me, seemed a waste of precious pesos in
Carmen's view. Nonetheless, she loved her work - providing services for
learning-disabled students who wouldn't have stood a chance in most other
countries of Latin America. With the resources she'd managed to scrape
together, she had appointed her home with care and taste; she sold party
decorations out the front window to bring in a little extra income. Andrés
had contributed repairs and refurbishments that kept the old house more
than livable.

Both Carmen and Andrés proclaimed their support for the revolution
- not stridently, but in the course of conversation, as it were. "Other
people around here - well, you'll have to ask them," said Carmen, not seeming
troubled that others might not share her views. I left the two of them,
feeling much revived, around 10:30 p.m. The TV had had a kind of brownout
- overheating, it seems, so that the image was only dimly visible on the
screen. A common problem with these old Russian models.

Intermezzo I: The Libreta

In a longish chat with Alexander a couple of days ago - he's the friend
of Oscar's whom I mentioned a while back, a sweet, soft-spoken young guy
- I managed to get an up-to-date breakdown of the libreta. This
is the state-rationed basket of goods (technically, the ration-book you
use to access them) which every adult Cuban receives monthly, in theory
at least. To what extent are the high prices in the markets and the dollar
shops offset by subsistence goods from the state?

The answer is, not very bloody far. According to Alexander, the libreta
consisted of:

6 pounds of rice monthly (all allotments are monthly unless otherwise
mentioned)
6 pounds of white sugar
6 pounds of raw sugar
2 pounds of chicharros (yellow beans), when available
Half a pound of salt
Half a pound of cooking oil
1 (small - hotel-style) bar of soap
1 small bun daily
2 small bags of coffee every fifteen days
6 eggs every fifteen days
A quarter-pound of chicken every three months
Half a pound of some miscellaneous commodity every three months (e.g.,
pasta, soya, an extra ration of chicken), depending on availability.

There you have it. Cuba has sugar like Canada has snow, so there's plenty
included. As for the other goods, estimates varied as to how far into the
month the libreta could be stretched. Alexander said he could make
it two weeks. Carmen found it lasted her about half as long. Either way,
when it ran out, and to supplement its meagre offerings, you were stuck
with purchases in the market. There, a single small onion would cost you
two pesos - around one percent of your monthly income; a clove of garlic
the same. A one-pound bag of rice cost five pesos; a small bag of pork
- about the only meat dependably available - 20 pesos. The quantity of
goods distributed through the libreta system has withered in the
last few years, with the state increasingly charging (though not paying
wages) at market rates. All the prices quoted are at the state-run markets.
Prices in the farmer's markets, or on the black market, are considerably
higher, and usually dollarized. But these may be the only channels available
for goods which, like lobster or cigars, are destined for export or the
tourist sector, and are therefore virtually absent from the official economy.
Milk is reserved for children under seven years of age, and nursing mothers.
Others can buy it only from those selling their allotment, or factory workers
dealing on the side.

Monday, 10 August 1998 - Havana

Newspaper seller, Havana
What this account of my time in Cuba's capital doesn't capture is the hours
and hours spent wandering the streets of Habana Vieja and Centro Habana.
This is an experience that can make your head swim, from the rank aroma
of piss and rotting fruit on most streets, the whiffs of exhaust from one
of the indestructible old gas-guzzlers of the 1950's, the hisses and urgent
whispers from the sidewalk - "Hey, man, what's your country?"; and above
all from the ferocious heat beating down on your face and the top of your
head. (Even the Cubans are feeling it - this summer, thanks to El
Niño, is hotter and drier than usual, and August is the hottest
month in Cuba anyway). ... I find myself setting out on some half-hour
mission and returning, dazed and sodden with sweat, after prowling through
backstreets and parks and along main boulevards. On a couple of occasions,
this wandering came about of necessity - trying to find food, of which
more later. Mostly, it was just getting creatively lost, and taking in
as much as I could.

These are throng-filled days in Havana. The city is heading into the
final week of its Carnaval - originally the holiday that celebrated the
bringing-in of the harvest. In the years of cruel austerity in the early
1990s, Carnaval, both in Havana and in Santiago de Cuba (where it is allegedly
more wild), was canceled by the state. Things are still threadbare. Rather
than an array of floats, for example, the parade on Saturday night had
one big one, with a band on board (this being Cuba, it was a huge and rocking
one). It made pit-stops every fifty yards or so, blasting at the crowds
in the bleachers and lining the railings. For this and the other festivities,
the Malecón on Saturday drew perhaps forty or fifty thousand people
along its length. The police presence was heavy, and this in part might
have accounted for an atmosphere that was more milling than celebration.

There were slim pickings, on such occasions, for the average Cuban.
He or she could buy a local brew in a cardboard container at roadside,
or one of the ubiquitous funnels of peanuts sold by street-vendors. There
might be an ice cream if you lined up a few minutes - eat it fast before
it drips all over your shoes. If you wanted a seat on the grandstands along
the parade, you had to pay - I didn't bother to find out how much. Most
people sprawled out on the Malecón and on public squares and statues,
doing more or less as they would have done on non-Carnaval days, only in
greater numbers.

Along the Malecón [Link to full-size version]
The Malecón itself - by which I mean the buildings ranged along
the waterfront - was an impressive sight. Earlier I mentioned the dereliction
of most of the dwellings in the older part of town. Perhaps surprisingly,
it is nowhere more evident than in the grand mansions lining one of the
really choice strips of riviera in the western hemisphere. The state of
these is frankly shocking. I was warned to walk well away from the overhangs;
a young girl had reportedly been killed by falling masonry. Hundreds of
edifices collapse each year throughout Havana, and it is striking to see
the densely-packed buildings of the Malecón Tradicional abutting
onto lots filled with rubble. How much sounder could the buildings attached
be? But they were still standing, and still well-populated.

There are several things to be said in defense of Cuban government policy
here. First, the reason Havana shows such signs of neglect is because the
Castro regime went against the Third World trend of concentrating resources
in the cities, the primate city in particular. Instead, investment in the
countryside greatly increased the social infrastructure there. Together
with state controls over internal movement, peasants were kept from flooding
into Havana by the millions and overwhelming it, the way that dozens of
urban centres in Latin America and around the world have been overwhelmed.

Second, the state did make a meaningful effort to evaluate the
soundness of these old buildings and to take appropriate counter-measures.
Take Alexander, for example - the provider of the libreta statistics.
He used to live right next door to Oscar (there is a hole in Oscar's wall
that actually looks down on the gutted interior of the building next door).
Sometime in the last couple of years, the house was declared uninhabitable.
The state, though, found Alexander and his father alternative housing -
in a modern apartment block at Alamar, across the bay and close to the
beach. Alexander considered it a real improvement: safer, less congested,
and much better for picking up girls. (We were at the height of the Cuban
holiday season, and in the afternoon the streets of Havana were full of
young men and women returning from a day at the fine municipal beaches.
They wandered in their still-damp bathing suits, with the sleepy look of
the sun-stunned.)

Kids on the Malecón
Lastly, one could note that at least the inhabitants of these once-glorious
buildings along the Malecón were ordinary people rather than millionaire
exploiters. There is nothing to separate the inhabitants of one of the
Malecón's mansions from any other residents of Havana - except perhaps
that they are slightly poorer. When the poor live in the houses of the
rich, even if those dwellings have run thoroughly to seed, you know a true
social revolution has taken place.

The long strolls through the city have their plot twists. Yesterday
afternoon I returned from a long and sun-soaked concert in the Callejón
de Hamel, where Salvador's striking street-murals were found. The sound
system collapsed in a hail of feedback about half an hour into the set,
but the final band of the day, at least, was able to rise to the occasion.
It was the mostly-female percussion group pictured earlier in these dispatches,
and it chanted and drummed with such mesmerizing intensity that microphones
were superfluous.

Cubans enjoying the music in the Callejón Hamel
I headed back to the casa particular; and only a block or so from
the gate, in broad daylight, a local lad nearly made away with my shoulder-bag.
The attempted snatch-and-grab was done on foot, rather than on a bicycle,
which may have been to my advantage. I had a reasonably secure hold, and
the bag was too well-constructed to be separated from the strap. Good thing,
too. In the bag was my camera, with nearly a full roll of photos, and also
my Lonely Planet guide.

After a couple of seconds of this Canada-versus-Cuba matchup in the
Ill-Will Games, my assailant gave up. He released the bag, and took off
at a brisk pace down the street, while I tried to remember the Spanish
for "coward" to yell after him. I walked the extra block to the casa,
heart pumping faster but not racing, shaking my head. I felt glad I'd won
the round, and vowed to wear that damn strap across my chest in the future,
even if it did heighten the discomfort of a soggy T-shirt. There was no
trauma to speak of, obviously. You know from an earlier entry that I was
aware of the bag-snatching danger. Anything without a weapon involved barely
rates as an assault, in my view; and assaults with weapons are unknown
in Cuba. But I was glad to keep the bag and its contents: thanks, Miriam,
for buying me such a tough little item for my travels.

Centro Habana skyline, storm brewing
The biggest problem remains food. It's funny how one's standards and outlook
can change in the space of a single week. My first night in Havana, I was
noting with surprise the amount of street food available for Cuban pesos,
and complaining about the buffet breakfast at the Hotel Capri. A week later,
I am marveling at how gruesomely bland is most of that street fare; and
remembering fondly that breakfast at the Capri ... Waffles! Waffles like
frisbees, yes, but waffles! Omelettes! All the citrus fruit you could eat,
as long as it was grapefruit!

The lineup of Cuban street food can be categorized as follows: 1) Pork
sandwiches of the decent type I scoffed on my first night in town; quite
rare, and very expensive in peso terms. 2) Pork sandwiches of a cheaper,
cruder, and altogether more gruesome variety, some of which are merely
white bread and gristle - you never know until you bite. 3) White bread
with butter. 4) Peanuts in paper funnels. 5) "Pizza." This is made from
baking-pan sized loaves of "bread" delivered by the truckload, then sprinkled
with a cheeselike substance (occasionally - very occasionally - with flecks
of onion or ham). This is then baked until thoroughly permeated by grease,
something which could be said for the street food as a whole. One day I
will write a (short) cookbook of such cuisine, called Fried Crap of
Cuba. 6) Refrescos (soft-drinks), of two or three basic types
and limitless in-house variations; some as refreshing as their name, some
like grim medicine. 7) Cheap industrial rum (not that I'm complaining about
the cheap part). 8) Coffee in strong, black shots like espresso, or café
con leche. Both are sweet and quite palatable; but while they may sustain
the traveler's spirit, they have no nutritive content whatsoever. This
is only slightly less than the other foodstuffs possess.

The list basically exhausts the culinary options at street-level in
Havana. A question immediately arises: why does a state-socialist regime
that runs just about every street-stall in the country allow such rubbish
to be served to the masses? The authorities might protest that it was simply
the Cuban taste to dig into such bland and greasy fare. As for me, whatever
enthusiasm I felt for the pre-fab pizza and mulched-pork sandwiches has
dissipated. I am turning into a gastronomic guerrilla, striking whenever
the opportunity permits - which is rarely. To this point, my only really
decent meal in Cuba has come at a paladar (private restaurant) to
which I, a Spanish woman named Alicia, and her Cuban friend Margareta were
led by the trusty Oscar, in the wake of that concert in the callejón.
The paladares have sprung up like mushrooms since state regulation
of private enterprise was eased in 1992-93. They tend to offer better food
and service than the state-run restaurants (which at my price level usually
serve either fried chicken or pork, both dreadful, and french fries like
woodchips). We paid US $7, plus beer, for solid and tasty fare that was
more than we could eat. I've decided I will either have to seek out these
places more determinedly in the future, or make all-inclusive arrangements
at casas particulares. For the time being, it's depressing always
to have a rumbling in your stomach and nothing within half an hour's walk
that really satisfies it - nothing I've yet found, anyway.

Friday, 13 August 1998
Santa Clara, Province of Villa Clara

I have just learned the true meaning of the word "laptop."

I'm sprawled out on my narrow but tolerably comfortable bed in the Hotel
Santa Clara Libre, writing these words on my Samsung portable after a few
hours of sightseeing in my first Cuban city outside Havana. The hotel room
wasn't something I'd anticipated. But when you don't roll into town until
4 a.m. ...

The train to Santa Clara was scheduled for 3:30 in the afternoon. I
got there early to be on the safe side. I needn't have bothered. It wasn't
until six or so that the train for Santiago de Cuba, which stopped in Santa
Clara, finally pulled into the station. It was the first train I'd actually
seen moving in the four hours or so that I'd been lounging. The wait, though,
gave me a chance to strike up a conversation with three friendly Dutch
guys - Paul, Pieter, and Ton. They were headed to Santa Clara as well,
and we continued our chat on the train. The loading was orderly, the carriage
air-conditioned and fairly comfortable, with an eclectic mix of backpackers
and Cubans.

As it transpired, we all had plenty of time to bond. Rumours swirled
of a derailment somewhere along the line, necessitating a detour. Sure
enough, round about midnight - already past our scheduled arrival time
in Santa Clara - Paul checked his map and confirmed the situation: we were
near Matanzas, a third or so of the way to Santa Clara. Well, it was a
chance to catch a few hours' shut-eye, and to have a sweet, faintly erotic
dream about Alona, the exuberant Israeli woman I'd just met, curled up
at that moment on the seat beside me.

When we trundled into Santa Clara at four in the morning, the Dutch
and Canadian contingent - all four of us - determined to benefit from the
new economies of scale. We could actually split double-rooms in a "peso
hotel" on the central square. By "peso hotel," I refer to another hybrid
Cuban institution. Peso hotels serve mainly Cubans, though by the looks
of things the better-heeled. They pay pesos; foreigners - stop me if you've
heard this one before - pay the same in dollars. What's more, there is
no guarantee that a given peso hotel will put you up. The first two we
tried in the bleary pre-dawn hours in Santa Clara told us they were "full."
It was almost certainly a nice way of saying, "We don't take gringos."

Once we'd reconciled ourselves to the Santa Clara Libre, the only hotel
that would have us, we had to sprawl in the lobby until seven, when the
check-in opened for the new day of registration. Perhaps there will come
a day when the $13.50 I would have had to pay for the extra night's rent,
in order to get to the room and to sleep right away, wouldn't seem worth
crashing out for. But by luck, the Santa Clara Libre had a decent lobby,
including a couple of overstuffed chairs. At 7 a.m. we were ushered to
our rooms, which were small, cramped, and bearable - even if the toilet
didn't flush (a bucket was provided), there was only cold water (from the
hot tap), and the water could be - and was - turned off for up to twenty
hours at a stretch.

What the Santa Clara Libre has in spades is recent history. The guidebook
informs me that the chipping and scarring on the façade of the hotel
was the result of bullet and artillery fire during the decisive final battle
of the Cuban Revolution, fought in these streets between 12 December 1958
and 1 January 1959. In what was certainly his finest moment as a military
commander, Che Guevara led a column of hundreds of rebels across half of
Cuba, from east to west - from their original redoubt in the mountains
of the Sierra Maestra, to the range of the Sierra del Escambray, which
begins a few kilometers south of Santa Clara. From those peaks, the rebels
launched their assault. Over the course of two weeks, they reduced the
operating range of the Cuban military to the very center of the city. Attempting
to break the siege, the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, dispatched an
armoured train filled with over 400 soldiers and heavy weaponry to the
city. An 18-person rebel strike force derailed the train with a bulldozer
- now mounted on a pedestal just down the road and over a bridge from the
central square. Alongside is the wreckage of the train itself, which
has been turned into a revolutionary memorial and museum. After an hour-and-a-half's
fighting, Batista's troops gave up: there wasn't necessarily a lot of reason
for those conscripts to be too enthusiastic about the engagement in the
first place.

The Hotel Santa Clara Libre
The Battle of Santa Clara was the straw that broke Batista's back. It essentially
ended with the seizure of the armoured train on 29 December 1958; by 1
January the dictator was heading out of the country to a comfortable exile
in Franco's Spain. That same day, the last of his forces surrendered in
the Gran Hotel. Well, it turned out the damage to the exterior of the building
I was staying in was more than the result of random shooting in the square.
The Gran Hotel was renamed the Santa Clara Libre after the revolution -
so I had the unexpected pleasure of spending a couple of nights in something
of a historical landmark.

Che, as commander of the battle that finally brought the revolution
to power, is most closely identified with Santa Clara. In 1997, when his
remains were dug up from the lonely Bolivian landscape in which he'd died
thirty years earlier, they were brought back with great ceremony to Santa
Clara, and reinterred in a huge memorial on the outskirts of town. They
are housed in a crypt, blessedly cool in the August heat; there is an eternal
flame. Buried alongside Che are most of the guerrillas who died beside
him in the Bolivian altiplano - the squalid end of a failed campaign
to spread the revolution beyond Cuba.

Che had travelled the length and breadth of Latin America before taking
up arms alongside Fidel Castro in 1956. Of all the countries he'd seen
en route, Bolivia seemed to him the most desperately poor and ready to
explode in revolution. Bad guess. There'd already been a revolution
in Bolivia in the 1950's. One of those half-revolutions, more like
it; but enough to entrench a notion that change was possible within
the system. The enormous difficulty of overcoming this skepticism, and
the cultural gulf between his tiny rebel force and the Aymara Indians of
the highlands, Che described with candour in the Bolivian Diary
published after his death. There was also the United States to be reckoned
with - well on its way to losing its first war at the time, and terrified
of Che's promised "one, two, many Vietnams." The U.S. flew in the Green
Berets to guide the Bolivian search forces, and added their unmatched surveillance
capabilities to the quest. It was enough to bottle Che up, capture him,
and execute him and his comrades in the presence of the U.S. advisors.
But over thirty years later, a fiasco like the Bolivian campaign tends
to recede into the background. It is as an icon that Che lives today -
and nowhere more than in Santa Clara, where every third resident seemed
to be wearing a T-shirt adorned with his brooding features.

The cynic might argue that from Fidel Castro's perspective, Che could
be safely lionized because he was safely dead. The two had had their disagreements
- resulting in Che's abandoning his ministerial post in the revolutionary
government and taking once again, this time disastrously, to the field.
Castro has exhibited moments of paranoia and/or calculated brutality towards
revolutionaries whom he views as rivals - as with the execution of General
Arnoldo Ochoa in 1989. So it is not impossible that the relations between
Fidel and Che are closer in death than they would have been in life.

This, though, would reckon without the genuine bond established between
the men who carried Cuba to the brink of revolution and beyond: to the
radical re-creation of Cuban society that took place in the first half
of the 1960s. In his farewell letter in 1966, Che wrote that if he, an
Argentine, died under foreign skies, it would be with the thought of the
Cuban people in his mind, "and above all you" - that is, Fidel. Che now
incarnates the heroic phase of the Cuban revolution, which Castro has exploited
to buttress his rule ever since. Forty years on, the story of the
Cuban Revolution has become less heroic. Or has it? It still seems bizarre
- delightful, somehow - that this impudent Third World revolutionary experiment
could survive only a few miles from the Florida Keys. That Castro himself
could have listened to the proclamations of his impending downfall issued
by one U.S. president after another ... and another ... and another. (Eight
in all, and counting.) It seems preposterous that any country could
have survived a 70-percent fall in production (1989-1994) without the regime
being violently overthrown. In Cuba, would-be emigrants crowded into dilapidated
boats and onto wooden rafts, and braved the shark-infested route to Florida.
But there were no riots in the streets, at a time when state-socialist
regimes worldwide were falling like ninepins.

Regime repression explains this only partly. An equally powerful factor,
manipulated and still in some sense incarnated by Castro and his regime,
is nationalism. I have been hearing a great deal over previous days - in
Havana, on the train to Santa Clara, and now in the streets of the city
- about life in Cuba. Much of it has been scathingly critical. But I have
also encountered a quiet, impressive pride in being Cuban - not the trigger-happy,
chip-on-the-shoulder, poverty-induced psychosis of certain other Caribbean
islands (Jamaica and Haiti come to mind). Some of it may just be that indefinable
"national spirit," but a great deal, it seems to me, has to do with what's
happened in Cuba since 1959.

The most eloquent testimony on this count was Oscar's, delivered the
night before I left Havana. "Do you know what separates this country from
many others?" he asked rhetorically. "Education. When you are educated
you can take your destiny in your own hands." Both he and Alexander were
fairly sanguine about Cuba's near-term prospects. This was a strong people,
said Oscar. It had endured a lot. The "Special Period" of the early '90s
was brutal, but there'd been some improvements since. Slight, but measurable.
"You see it yourself, my friend. People are surviving."

Direnia, Yaima, Migdalia: Train to Santa Clara [Link to full-size image]
On the train to Santa Clara I met Migdalia: a forceful working-class woman,
mid-thirties at a guess, who toiled in the tobacco fields of Havana province.
She described enthusiastically and in detail the variety of tasks she performed
- inspecting the leaves for insects or fungus, harvesting them, hanging
them to dry in the shed, and so on. She talked about the house she held
title to. She'd bought it for 1,200 pesos - a year's wages. You'd have
to be pretty far up the economic scale before you could make a proportionate
purchase in Canada. (And you'd be paying more than seventy dollars for
a house.) Meanwhile, Migdalia's utterly radiant kid, Yaima, was joining
an equally irresistible playfriend, Direnia, in clambering all over the
smattering of foreigners in the railway car. Both Yaima and Direnia already
spoke a clear, educated-sounding Spanish; neither of them wanted more from
us than good-humoured attention; and every time they smiled, their white,
white teeth beamed like beacons. They were the children of the "Special
Period," as their mother was a daughter of the revolution's heroic years.
But Castro had vowed not to close a single hospital or daycare center during
the years of austerity, and to keep the milk coming. Even during the gruesome
economic crisis of the early '90s, evidence indicated the promise had been
kept.

Santa Clara sunset
The city of Santa Clara, too, somewhat altered the picture of Cuba I'd
been building up in Havana - and for the better. It was a tidy and surprisingly
prosperous-looking town, unpretentious, with a few beautifully-restored
old buildings to go with the well-built modern structures. I couldn't say
for certain that this reflected a starving of Havana's resources to the
benefit of provincial centres like Santa Clara. Quite possibly, the challenge
of maintaining the densely-packed structures of Habana Vieja and Centro
Habana was simply far beyond what city planners and municipal service-providers
faced in Santa Clara. But walking the clean-swept streets of this city,
peeking inside its public and private buildings, I was impressed. My Dutch
friends and I also grew convinced that there was more in the shops (for
dollars, of course) than in downtown Havana - and no apparent shortage
of customers. A good example was cheese, next to impossible to find in
Havana except as a light daubing on the "pizzas." In Santa Clara, the street-stalls
seemed to be full of cheese bocaditos (the greasy little sandwiches
which, in the capital, are usually filled with mulched pork and gristle).
And there were the first strolling vendors any of us had seen - only a
couple of them, but selling bananas and string beans, and calling out their
wares lustily as they went.

The more positive reports and impressions I've amassed over the last
few days have warred inside me with the blistering criticisms I continue
to receive about the system and the economy. Some fragmentary encounters:

• My next-to-last day in Havana, once again on a quixotic quest through
enervating heat for some kind of breakfast, stopping at a stand serving
a bearable watermelon concoction, knocking back glass after glass, and
listening to the system be mocked and reviled by the two powerful middle-aged
women who ran the stand ... Once again, the almost exclusive focus of their
criticisms was the humiliations involved in trying to make a living. One
pulled out a box of receipts and other state documentation that tabulated
every inventory element in their tiny production operation. "If we don't
keep every last one of these and have them ready when the inspector comes
round, it's a fifteen hundred pesos fine!" (On one occasion Felicia, my
landlady, shooed me to the rear of the house when an inspector came by
to check up on the hair-salon she ran up front. She wasn't panicked about
my presence, but an inspector who noticed foreigners hanging around the
place might have reported it to another inspector. If she was rumbled,
she too faced a whopping fine.)

• The train to Santa Clara, the same one that Yaima and Direnia lit
up with their beaming presence: Miguel, a fast-talking, genial young Cuban
man, the type who in Miami would be an up-and-coming Cuban-American executive,
running down in merciless detail the economic contradictions you're getting
tired of hearing about - imagine what they're like to live. The slog of
daily existence, the challenge of stretching the libreta past a
few days ... and the closing of many of the entrepreneurial routes by which
people could improve things by their own devices.

• Painfully, here in Santa Clara, an elderly gentleman named Martín,
who'd lived some years in the States and wanted to practise his rusty English,
maybe hustle a dollar or two. He was a pensioner from the military living
- ostensibly - on a hundred pesos a month. "Five dollars," he said darkly.
"Many nights I have bad dreams, thinking how I will be able to find something
for breakfast the next day." Probably, as in Russia and many other countries
that have experienced sharp economic upheavals in recent years, it is the
pensioners who have suffered the worst during Cuba's special period - seen
their expectations of a secure retirement rudely dashed. The pretty central
square of Santa Clara, Parque Vidal, has a number of beggars (though I
suspect not homeless ones): usually either very young or very old. Our
breakfasts in Santa Clara, bread and cheese and Maple Leaf Chicken Bologna,
have been eaten on a bench in the park. The old guys were fairly genteel
and apologetic about it, but they still asked straight out for money for
something to eat. It was enough to make you feel a little exhibitionist,
munching on the classic backpacker's breakfast, "hobo food" in the west,
as one of our number put it. A sweet younger woman, Yoleidy, has been in
the park with her young daughter over the last couple of days, and we've
chatted. She issued a hushed "Qué rico!" (How wonderful!)
when we peeled back the wrapper on our Maple Leaf mystery meat. Yoleidy
wasn't obviously malnourished, but when we left her a little of our bread,
she set into it immediately and with gusto. If nobody in Cuba is starving,
hunger - perhaps especially in the cities - is a constant presence. Many
people subsist on liquids and a bun during the daytime, pooling their resources
for an evening meal with some substance. Statistics from April 1993 showed
Cubans consuming 2000 calories a day on average, "a decrease of some 30
percent from 1989 and below the minimal essential level specified in the
mid-1950s. And [caloric intake] dropped just when routine living required
more calories: when islanders had to take up bicycle riding as their principal
means of transport."(6)

Saturday, 14 August 1998

Final night in Santa Clara

Paul, Felix, Pieter, Ton - Santa Clara
Backpacking travelers also have experience in pooling resources. Just as
rooming with Paul gave me a chance to stay at the Santa Clara Libre, so
he and his two companions opened up new vistas when it came to getting
around. Felix, a lithe, guerrillero-looking young Frenchman we'd
met on the train, joined us today to rent a vehicle for the afternoon.
And what a vehicle! A Willys army jeep, refurbished to the max, with a
new engine and a host of odd little touches cribbed from here and there.
Its proud owner was Adolfo Rodríguez. Adolfo had driven a bus before
the "Special Period" hit in 1989. A good life, as he remembered it. He'd
made around 300 pesos a month, back when pesos meant something. "I didn't
own a car. Didn't need to. Public transport was great. There'd be a bus
every two or three minutes to where you wanted to go." When the economy
collapsed, he started looking around for other means of survival. A car,
he decided, was "indispensable." With the help of a brother living in New
York, he took over the Willys from his father. The restoration work was
done with parts imported by his brother on yearly visits; pillaged from
the old Soviet and East German vehicles that are still mainstays of the
Cuban transport system; and occasionally purchased for dollars at Cuban
automotive stores.

Traveling solo, this sort of luxury would have been beyond my means.
With the group, it became possible. I also had the benefit of the experiences
and insights of my Dutch friends, who had visited Piñar del Rio,
an attractive-sounding region in western Cuba that I would not make it
to on this trip. If there's an offsetting disadvantage to my new arrangement,
it came with traveling in a pack. I stood out anyway here, with my height,
my comparative paleness, and my windswept shock of hair. But it could feel
more awkward still walking down the street five abreast. Showdown
at the O.K. Corral ...

There was a bit of a Wild West - or at least a Mexican - feel
to our afternoon destination. Adolfo ferried us northeast to Remedios,
a town of twenty thousand or so about fifty kilometres from Santa Clara.
The ride, hunkered down in the back of the Willys, took us through the
first Cuban countryside I'd really seen up close. It was green and verdant,
seemingly well-developed, with concrete water towers dotting the landscape,
sprinkler and irrigation systems in abundance, and an obvious delivery
of state services: electricity, schooling, medical facilities. I found
myself wondering whether Cuba might not provide a rare example of a country
where the rural folk had weathered economic crisis better than their compatriots
in the city. (There are indications that many city-dwellers volunteered
for rural labour during the "Special Period" because food supplies were
more varied and dependable in the countryside.)

Remedios itself was a somewhat ramshackle colonial town, full of low
18th and 19th century structures, some much older
- the town was founded in 1524. For a century-and-a-half it had been the
largest town in the area, but many colonists abandoned it in the face of
repeated pirate attacks. (Settlers escaping Remedios founded Santa Clara.)
In the late 17th century a fire further reduced its vitality
and influence. Like many such backwaters, though, there was plenty of faded
beauty about the place. We strolled some distance out into the countryside.
There we were invited to tour a large concrete building that was much quieter
than it would have been at other times of the year. It was a school for
handicapped kids, and the smattering of caretakers hanging about were pleased
to show us the near-deserted facilities. They were immaculately tidy and
thoroughly impressive. "I tell you in all truth," said Felix to me in the
cafeteria, "there are many schools in France that are worse than this."
This was a school for handicapped children, please remember - not
rich ones - and it was located well away from the centre of power, on the
outskirts of a small provincial town.

At some point in our wanderings it struck us just how close we were
to the north coast. Those pirate attacks, after all - the Atlantic Ocean
was less than ten kilometres away! It was immediately decided that we should
head to the beach. A price was negotiated with Adolfo back in the central
square. After a round of chilled Mayabe beer on the plaza's edge, we took
to the road again, to the coastal town of Caibarien. There, with a heavy
thunderstorm out to sea turning the sky to ink, we strolled along a beach
entirely for locals, enjoying one of the few recreations that Cubans, at
least those within striking distance of the Atlantic or Caribbean, could
still indulge in.

Just visible on the horizon was the extraordinary engineering project
under at Caibarien: a 48-kilometre causeway across the Bahia Buena Vista,
linked together by "45 bridges that allow an exchange of tidal waters"
(LP). The project was aimed at opening up the offshore island of
Cayo Santa Maria for high-priced tourism. Nonetheless, it was an example
of the large-scale endeavours that Cubans can still put their minds and
resources to. It was built between 1989 and 1996 - that is, in the midst
of the worst economic dislocation Cuba had known in the twentieth century.

The man who addicted me to cigars
On our side of the bay, we watched Cubans frolicking delightedly in the
murky, seaweed-laden surf. An old man wandered along with a horse-drawn
carriage. He sold us a fat cigar from a bundle - two pesos, or ten cents.
It tasted sweeter and better than the $15 Cohiba a friend had given me
to sample in Mexico. He sang us a song and posed for a photo before wandering
off with his steed.

After a while the rain reached us, lightly, and we turned back to Santa
Clara. Adolfo told us his story along the way, and delivered his thoughts
on life in Cuba. It was still hard as hell, he said - you had to work from
six in the morning to ten at night to get by - but things were "más
o menos." More or less survivable. Government policy was constrained
by the American blockade and the collapse of Soviet aid, Adolfo said. On
its own terms, government policy had "good points and bad points." The
best of the system was plain in the "beautiful" statistics on health and
education. And the worst? I asked. It was the way the regime bottled you
up inside your house and inside your head, if you wanted to give real vent
to your creative energies. If that ever changed, Adolfo said - if people
were given greater room to breathe, politically and entrepreneurially -
the crisis would be surmounted. He, like Oscar, stressed that Cubans were
"un pueblo luchando" - a people well-used to struggle. The most
popular slogan I've seen on walls and sidings is "Un Paso Más"
- One Step More. I'm sure it resonates with most Cubans, though not always
in the way the regime intends.

Tuesday, 17 August 1998 - Trinidad

Alain, a young guy who hung around the Santa Clara central square, drove
us on to Trinidad. His vehicle was a Moskvitch, a 1980s-era Soviet sedan.
He nursed the beast as far as the outskirts of Sancti Spiritus before it
blew a tire and had to be repaired at roadside. A few kilometres further
on, we entered the tawny range of the Sierra del Escambray (which our dog's-leg
route via Sancti Spiritus was designed to avoid as far as possible: there
is a direct road from Santa Clara to Trinidad, but only the hardiest vehicles
can handle the grades). The Moskvitch began to wheeze. The radiator boiled
over, and we parked it again for a half-hour or so before continuing. I
used the break to stretch and drink in the pastoral scenery that had accompanied
us from the start of the trip. Somehow, especially in this year of El Niño,
I'd expected drier, more crumbled scenery in Cuba. The greenery in these
central regions of the island was a welcome surprise.

We rolled over the low foothills of the Sierra and into the Valley of
San Luís. The traditional life's blood of this region opened up
to us: dozens of sugar-cane fields, the detritus of stalks strewn carelessly
over the surface of the road. Occasional plumes of black smoke rose from
the modern mills in the valley. Around a last bend, and we were in Trinidad.

The city of Trinidad was founded in 1514. It was the third Spanish
city in Cuba (hence in the Americas). Presiding over the founding Mass
for the city was the Catholic friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who
is remembered today for his petitions to the Spanish crown, calling for
the rights of the much-abused indigenous population to be protected. Hernán
Cortés, future conqueror of the Aztec Empire, raised men for his
Mexico expedition in Trinidad. But the town had little significance in
the economic life of the island.

That changed in the early 19th century, when hundreds of
French sugar-planters and their families were evicted from Haiti by the
slave rebellion there - the only successful one ever mounted in the Americas.
They converged on Trinidad, and the town and surrounding area became the
centre of the modern Cuban sugar industry. The mills of that era were generally
reduced to rubble in the fighting that raged during Cuba's wars of independence
from Spain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But though the
industry for the most part relocated elsewhere, sugar remained important
to the economy of the valley and surrounding region.

In Trinidad itself, the sugar boom financed the spate of construction
which turned the city into the UNESCO world heritage site that it is today.
The cobblestoned streets, lined with 19th-century manor houses
and low-slung suburban dwellings, occupied a manageable area, but sprawled
with a charming aimlessness. At the town's edge they dissipated into paths
that let one stroll on into the lush countryside.

Reconstruction work was proceeding apace in Trinidad, but most of the
façades were pleasantly weathered and faded, and tufts of grass
grew thick between the cobblestones on the edge of town. The fresh piles
of horseshit that had constantly to be dodged were a reminder that the
countryside began only metres away.

Alain's Moskvitch brought us to the door of another casa particular;
he collected, I learned later, a $30 commission for the service. The residence
was touted on the business card as a "Bed and Breakfort," which sounded
original, at least. It belonged to Norma and Umberto Peña - an early-40's
couple who, together with their kids Landis and Lilian, ran a tight ship
indeed. (Among other things, the family deserved a medal for its kitchen,
the cleanest I saw in Cuba.)

It was a definite step up from my rustic digs at Felicia's place in
Havana - and legal to boot. Norma and Umberto were playing things strictly
by the book. Several books, actually - the ones in which they carefully
recorded our names and passport numbers, along with every meal we ate and
beer we drank in their household. These would be carefully inspected for
tax purposes, and in that department the Peñas - like all legal
operators - were taking on a heavy burden indeed. They paid $200 a month
for the license to operate as a casa particular, and another $60
for the license to serve food. Both had to be paid whether anyone was
actually staying there or not. When there was someone in the house,
the money could add up fast - but it couldn't be immediately spent. It
had to be saved to cover the taxes in leaner months - the September-to-November
lull. Only when that was over could the remaining hard currency be safely
dispensed with.

To me, the policy seemed unfair, potentially ruinous. But Norma and
Umberto (in partnership with Landis) had apparently decided it offered
the best route to material stability. They'd rented the house from Umberto's
aunt; the family picked up and moved down
the block to Norma's mother's place when foreigners wanted the rooms. They were
part of the new generation of above-ground family entrepreneurs - and damned
nice folks to boot.

Of course, I might have been extra-favourably disposed to them, because
they also filled the yawning gap in my stomach. For three dollars, we voyagers
got a fine, fruit-filled breakfast built around a tasty ham-and-cheese
omelet. Dinner was six dollars: our choice of pork, chicken or fish, with
vegetables that seemed exotic after a couple of weeks in Cuba - cucumbers
with carrot shavings; green beans. For dessert there was a spongy Cuban
cheese, slightly gritty, and a little slab of guayaba jelly.

For the family themselves, this meant a lot of work: a couple of hours
before every dinner, not counting the shopping. They ate separately from
us, and in much more modest quantities. But for their labours, they lived
relatively comfortably, in a country where that could rarely be said.

Earlier today, Umberto helped me run my clothes through the family's
Soviet-made washing machine. It was a real robotic-looking device; the
drainpipe for the water had no cap, and we had to improvise. At this point
the bottle of Liquid Paper I had brought with me on the trip finally came
in handy - if only to bung up the pipe. Then, loaded with my laundry, the
machine refused to work. ("So many clothes for one trip!" Norma marveled,
the first time in my life I've felt like Imelda Marcos.) I halved the load,
and it picked up the pace. As I drained the soapy water after the wash,
Selina, the family's housemaid, began to wring the clothes for hanging
on the line. "Whoa!" yelped the traveler. "Rinse cycle!" The practice,
it transpired, was unknown to her, and probably to most Cubans with washing
machines. I insisted on the rinse, however, figuring that I now had an
explanation for the mysterious prickly heat that had been vexing my back
for the previous few days. Felicia had kindly washed my clothes for me
in a virtually identical machine in Havana, and hung them up for me - still
impregnated with laundry soap, I'm quite certain.

For the access to the washing machine, I decided to compensate Norma
and the spritely 12-year-old daughter, Lilian, with a bar of laundry soap
I'd brought from Mexico, along with a couple of bars of Camay soap reeking
of perfume. (Memo to anyone contemplating a trip to this land: bring
things! Soap goes over very well - this afternoon I was approached
by a young boy begging for it. I also have several boxes of Aspirin reserved
for Carmen in Havana. Analgesics are very hard to find in the state-run
dispensaries. They're just the thing for a woman who has to take care of
a lot of kids with headaches - and maybe has a few of her own as a result.)

To stay at the house of Norma and Umberto was to appreciate once again
the astonishing closeness - in both emotional and geographical terms -
of many Cuban families. At any one time in the house there would be not
only the two parents and their offspring, but also another Norma - the
grandmother, a vigorous elderly woman who seemed every bit a match for
Orlando. He was the wiry and gruff-spoken grandfather who also milled around
a lot. Selina, who cleaned house, was a cousin. All tsk-tsk'ed when
I describe my own family - scattered around the world, with parents 400
km away.

Up on the roof one evening, with Lilian cuddled at his side, Umberto
described his philosophy of life. "I'm not really political. There are
good things and bad things in Cuba. I just want to be able to provide for
my family and give them a good foundation in life." The roof we were sitting
on would serve as the foundation for a planned second storey and two extra
rentable rooms. With both Norma and Umberto also holding down day-jobs,
the challenge seemed daunting: I knew the amount of work that went into
feeding half the number of travelers they were now hoping to attract. But
there was always her mother to assist, Norma told me; and if worse came
to worst, she could look for hired help.

My second day in town, crashed out with a book after failing to keep
up with the Dutch in the sweltering heat, Umberto came home with an invitation:
"Let's go to the beach!" He and I sped twenty kilometres or so out of town
to the west, to a river marking the border with Cienfuegos Province. Where
the river met the sea, there was the type of beach that was leagues removed
from the endless white sand of the tourist resorts. It was a little sandbar
underneath a highway overpass - although, Cuban traffic being as light
as it is, there was no constant roar to spoil the scene. On one side of
the sandbar was the broad blue Caribbean, and on the other a stretch of
still pool, fronded by forest. The river flowed past a campesino's thatched-roof
property that clung to the banks.

At the beach with Norma and UmbertoOn
the sandbar itself was assembled a large proportion of the Peña
clan of Trinidad. They included Orlando's brother, who'd already partaken
liberally of rum, and kept urging me to take photos. Umberto had dropped
the group off earlier in the day. Now we were here to take them home -
but first to linger. For a couple of hours, as the sun headed towards the
rugged nearby hills of the Sierra, I was welcomed into the clan. When they
heard I would be celebrating my 35th birthday on the flight
back to Mexico, far from home and family, they displayed shock. We must
hold a party before my departure! I immediately regretted letting them
in on the news, since such an event could only cut into scarce family income.
Umberto, though, was insistent. "We'll get a fish, and a cake with 35
candles!" Mortified, I managed to negotiate them down to a meat dinner,
with me springing for the beer, and no cake - or so they promised. We drove
happily back through the pink haze of sunset. Six of us in the little car:
husband and wife, daughter, grandad, his drunken brother - whom little
Lilian was doing a soldierly job of propping up in the back seat - and
the solitary gringo, suddenly not feeling so far from home after all.

Any environment, of course, has its drawbacks. If there was one to
Norma and Umberto's, it was the nearness of the house to the main street.
That those antique American cars still ran was impressive; but they made
a hell of a racket. So, too, did charming Lilian's solitary disco tape,
which seemed to get an airing about three times a day. All of us found
ourselves mindlessly singing and whistling bubble-gum confections like,
"In the heat of the night / I'll be having a fiesta." I myself was
mortified by an unconscious tendency to break out in choruses of "I'm
a Barbie girl / In a Barbie world" ...

The Dutch and I shared a strong inclination to explore beyond Trinidad's
limits. Again, our numbers gave us the freedom to do so. We hired vehicles
for two daytrips - one to the Sierra del Escambray range framing the city
to the north, the other to the Valle de los Ingenios.

Note: makes a nice wallpaper on your screen!

The Valle was the general name given to the region of sugar-cane plantations
and mills (ingenios) that surrounded Trinidad. One impressive monument
had withstood the devastation of the later 19th century: a tower, 44 metres
high, at the estate of one Manaca Iznaga. Iznaga took over the plantation
in the 19th century and "eventually became one of the wealthiest men in
Cuba by trading in slaves" (LP). There was an expansive view of
the surrounding fields and valleys from the summit of the tower. This was
as intended: it was a watchtower, used to surveil the slaves. The huge
bell mounted nearby had summoned them to work.

Reading, later that day, a chapter by Kevin Yelvington on "Patterns
of Ethnicity, Class, and Nationalism" in Latin America, I was surprised
to learn that the Caribbean had received about 40 percent of the "more
than 10 million Africans [who] reached the New World." (Ten million more,
Yelvington reminds us, did not survive the passage.) Another 40 percent
went to Brazil. The United States, where a civil war was fought in part
over the issue, and where the legacy of slavery looms so large today, received
barely 4 percent of the slaves transported to the Americas.(7)

As we strolled down the lanes, dotted with goats and pigs, and into
the cane-fields beyond, I found myself wondering how many of the residents
of the valley could trace a direct descent from the slaves who had been
worked to death in these fields. Given the geographical stability of many
Cuban families - at least those members who remained in the country - it
would not be unusual if the young Black boys who led Paul away to chase
butterflies were leading him down paths their ancestors had trodden in chains.(8)

Ton, hiking in the Topes de Collantes
My Dutch friends' final day in town offered an opportunity to explore more
of a countryside that we all agreed was a match for the glories of the
town. This time, our route took us up a switchback-laden 18-kilometre road
into the Sierra del Escambray, the 90-km range that binds the provinces
of Sancti Spiritus and Cienfuegos. The main settlement was Topes de Collantes,
set at a refreshing altitude of 800 metres. A couple of walking trails
led through the stands of conifer and pine that thickly blanketed the mountainside.

The Escambray had proved an ideal base for Che Guevara's guerrilla bands:
the attack on Santa Clara was launched from here, after the "long march"
overland from the rebels' original base in the Sierra Maestra of eastern
Cuba. After the revolution, though, these mountains had also harboured
hundreds of counter-revolutionary rebels - "bandits" is the accepted term
in Cuba. The CIA-supported bands were gradually hunted down; by 1965 they
had ceased to operate. But a number of Trinidadians died in hot pursuit,
or otherwise. A museum in town commemorated them, along with other residents
who died in the fight to overthrow Batista. (I learned I was living
with one of the casualties of the banditry. Orlando, the patriarch of the
Peña clan, hiked up his pants leg to show me where two or three
bullets had ripped through the fleshy part of his calf. He was injured
in a surprise attack by the contras, as he called them, in 1962,
on the road just outside Trinidad.)

We chose the more arduous of the two hikes available to us, and headed
down, down, down the hillside. The foliage occasionally parted to reveal
breathtaking vistas of mountain and valley. At a salto (ravine)
called Caburní, we found a waterfall gushing over the lip of a high
precipice, spilling a couple of hundreds of metres through scattered pools
and boulders to a lagoon far below. The water in these pools was clear
and chilly from the mountains. We gratefully stripped down, dived in, and
basked. I hadn't seen much hot water in Cuba, but neither had I found much
truly cold water - at the height of the tropical summer, what came
out of the taps and spigots was tepid at best. This was a pure treat.

We washed the mud and sweat of the hike off us and frolicked on the
rocks. Then we turned around and faced the hard part - climbing back up
the hillside. Near the top, drooping with fatigue, an afternoon shower
caught us, the raindrops glittering when residual rays of sun shone through
the clouds. We waited it out on a farmer's veranda, and then trooped the
final few hundred metres to the parking lot and waiting sedan. Our driver,
on the steep descent, used the engine only sparingly, preferring to coast.
Apparently brake replacements in Cuba were cheaper than gasoline. I hoped
brake replacements were cheaper than gasoline.

On Wednesday Pieter, Ton, and Paul collected their belongings and hauled
them into the living room, to await the car they'd hired to take them back
to Havana. In two days' time they'd be flying to Europe with Cubana. I
took the opportunity to slip them a disk with a backup copy of my Cuba
ramblings, and the text of a message to e-mail home to Miriam. I hadn't
expected to get this indirect access to the 'Net during my Cuba travels.
I smiled at the thought of a "Message from Adam" turning up in my friend's
mailbox, smuggled out from behind what was left of the Iron Curtain.

I spent the last few minutes chatting with the Dutch. Their driver had
turned up slightly early. We suggested he return in a quarter of an hour.
After half an hour, we began scanning the horizon for him. After an hour,
irritation was palpable. After an hour-and-a-half, there was nothing to
do but trudge back to the intermunicipal bus station, where I negotiated
another ride for them. I half-expected the original driver to be
waiting when we returned to the Peña residence. But he wasn't, and
he didn't show anytime in the hour or two I spent there after the Dutch
had chugged off into the distance. Go figure.

With the Dutch gone I was back on my own, for the first time since the
train station in Havana. Umberto offered me the use of his bicycle gratis.
After a day spent finding my own bearings in the cobblestoned network of
Trinidad, I headed out to the two beaches, Boca and Ancón, near
town. The bicycle had only one brake that partly worked. That was manageable.
But it also had no padding on the seat. After a while, this proved a terrible
aggravation to my bony trasero (rump). I ended up alternating between
riding half side-saddle, and hopping off to push the bike along the road,
through marshy, bird-filled countryside.

At Ancón I found the only really classic Cuban beach I would
see on the trip: four kilometres of curving white sand, and at the end
of it the hulking three-star Hotel Ancón. There was surprisingly
little development along the remainder of the stretch. The package tourists
thronging the central square of Trinidad came on daytrips from Varadero
and other resorts. A good eighty percent of Ancón was occupied by
Cubans, along with a smattering of foreigners who'd hired their own transport.
If Ancón and the Playas del Este near Havana (where I'd stayed in
1993) were any indication, at least those beaches that Cubans traditionally
used were not being closed off to them when tourist development began.

It was a hard pedal home, into the wind most of the way. When I reached
the outskirts of Trinidad I stopped at a roadside stall selling guarapo
- sugar-cane juice prepared before my eyes, by a young man whose task in
life it was to feed the cane into a grinder and collect the foaming, bilious-looking
output in a bucket. It wasn't as cloying a drink as you might expect, and
after the exertions of the day it was just the ticket. A tall, consummately
refreshing glass cost 80 centavos - less than a nickel.

Trinidad backstreets [Link to full-size image]
At the central plaza in Trinidad, I spied a picturesque old man on a donkey,
and thought of taking a snap. The man came closer, and I saw the donkey
had a sign looped around its ears, in English: "For hire. Photos 50 cents."

It was that kind of place, and would only become more so, as hundreds
of thousands of package tourists were shuttled into the city centre for
their quick glimpse of the cathedral, the plaza, and the surrounding streets.
At peak hours the tourists were already the main attraction. They drew
troupes of young boys and older hustlers to their midst, and their free-spending
ways had given rise to a street full of the most execrable souvenir stands
I have ever seen.

The developing character of Trinidad gave me pause when I thought of
making a more serious investment in the town. It was a possibility that
had occurred to me in the months before the journey. If at some point in
the near future my earning-power took a sharp turn upwards, as seemed not
inconceivable, why not use some of it to build and operate the guest-house
to end all guest-houses? Well, hardly - but I'd long had a fantasy of creating
the sort of backpacker's environment I'd like to stumble across
in my travels. There would be a "Burton Room"
for book-reading and swapping, a little restaurant serving simple vegetarian
dishes (a first in Cuba?), and a bar with a deep and very cold refrigerator
stocked with every worthwhile variety of Cuban beer, bottled only. Profit
was a secondary consideration in all this, and cozy community relations
a must.

Trinidad had appealed to me, in the abstract, for the way it combined
urban antiquity with a proximity to beaches and rugged mountains. The countryside
had more than met expectations: the hideaway beaches that only Cubans went
to; the thickly-forested mountains of the Sierra del Escambray; the valleys
still woven with sugar-cane and dotted with mills. I feared for the town
itself, wondering whether it would be too small to withstand the deluge
that would descend upon it in coming years. But its charms were ample when
the package-tourists had gone for the day. And by night Trinidad was haunting.
Strolling its dimly-lit streets to the outskirts, only a couple of hundred
metres from the main plaza, you really could imagine the scene a hundred
and fifty years ago; the cliché of the "living museum" itself took
ghostly life.

Books on Cuba from Amazon.com

Created by Adam Jones, 1998. Photographs copyright 1998.
No copyright claimed for non-commercial use of text or images if author
is credited and notified.adamj_jones@hotmail.comLast updated: 10 October 2000.

Notes

1. Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1964).

2. The colours aren't a coincidence, by the way.
The flag was designed in the 1850's by Narciso Lopez, "a former Spanish
general who favored annexation to the US as a means of preserving slavery."
He staged a couple of abortive invasions of Cuba, including Americans in
his forces, and the flag is his "enduring legacy ... Its single white star
(like that of slaveholding Texas) appears on a red Masonic triangle against
horizontal white and blue stripes, ironic symbols of the U.S. annexation
effort." (LP)

3. If you look closely in The Godfather, Part
II - the scenes set in Havana at the moment of Batista's collapse - you can see Al Pacino
stroll into the lobby of a Hotel Capri.

4. The monument, a couple of blocks from my hotel,
commemorates the U.S. soldiers who died in 1898 when a battleship blew
up in Havana Harbour. That kicked off the so-called "Spanish-American War,"
really more of an intervention by the Americans to suppress the Cuban independence
movement, which had all but defeated the Spanish by that point. The pro-American
wording on the monument is still there, but on the other side the Cubans
have added an inscription stating that the victims were "sacrificed" by
imperialism - hinting at a fairly common conspiracy theory, that the Maine was
deliberately blown up by the U.S. to provide a pretext for intervention.

5. For a profile of Alarcón, see Walter Russell
Mead, "Castro's Successor?," The New Yorker, 26 January 1998.

8. David Stanley notes that the Cuban conga line,
which "invariably feature[s]" in the dance shows presented to tourists,
"originated as a dance for African slaves, who could only take short steps
due to the shackles on their feet." (LP)